Category: Drink

Advice on what to cook tonight

There are significant differences between the terms “grilling” and “barbecuing.”

It has to do largely with what kind of meat you are cooking. If it is a tender, juicy cut of beef, for instance, you will probably want to grill it — cook it quickly, over fairly high heat.

Dan DeSouci is the owner of the Up in Your Grill Food Truck (493-3191, upinyourgrill.com) and a competitive griller. Barbecuing, he said, is something very different.

“Classic Southern barbecue is low and slow, typically,” he said. “There are other methods — hot and fast methods — but typically, it’s low and slow. And it’s usually the bigger and tougher meats. Originally, these larger cuts — like say a pork butt or brisket — if you try to cook them on a grill they usually come out very tough. If you cook it low and slow in a smoker or really any low and slow method, it’s going to break down all the fat and connective tissue. The meats are just going to kind of stew their own juices and become very, very tender. That’s the goal of barbecue.”

And then there’s grilling, he said.

“Grilling is hot and fast where [the meat is] direct over fire — like steak or a pork chop, any kind of chop, fish filets or something you want to expose to high heat. That’s grilling. I have trophies for grilling, so I have opinions about this. My nickname is actually Grill Man Dan.”

One of the most popular grilling techniques in recent years, DeSouci said, is something called a “reverse sear.”

“So there’s direct searing,” he explained. “An easy example is that you take a New York sirloin strip steak, right? You put it on the grill. You put it directly on the fire, you’re just grilling it, right? Put it on there, you get some grill marks, then put it over indirect heat until it cooks to the temperature you like, and it’s wonderful. But there’s some people who swear by what’s called the reverse sear. They’ll put [a steak] over the cold zone of the grill, close the top, let it cook a little bit. When it’s cooked to the temperature they want, they open the top and put it onto the direct heat, get those grill marks and finish it really fast.”

There are any number of steaks that are well-known for how well they grill — T-bones, porterhouses and rib-eyes come to mind — but it’s easy to focus on those and miss out on a world of things to grill.

One category of meat that gets overlooked for the grill, DeSouci said, is fish.

”I actually love trout,” he said. “You can cook trout with the skin on, which helps it hold together better. You can grill right on the grill with the skin, but a lot of people [use] fish baskets for the flakier fish.” These are the black steet baskets you find where you buy grilling equipment, he explained, the ones with lots of medium-sized holes in them. “You can do like what some folks will do,” DeSouci continued, “steaks like a tuna steak or a swordfish steak — a firmer fish. You can even grill salmon steaks that are cut the other way [cut the long way, with the grain of the flesh, giving the fish a firmer texture]. Those are going to hold up better to direct grilling and direct heat, whereas with flakier fish you’re better off in a basket.”

Home grillers don’t necessarily have to invest in special equipment to begin with, DeSouci said. “There are other tricks too,” he said. “There are some wonderful recipes out there where you put everything in some foil and wrap it. So you’ll put something like a cod fillet, some lemon in there and some herbs, and a little bit of oil, and then you wrap it up in the foil and put it on the grill and flip it a few times and take it off the grill. It comes out wonderful.”

When he’s at home, DeSouci loves to grill pork.

“I can’t get enough of pork chops,” he said. “Chicken and pork are going to be a lot cheaper than beef or fish. And the best chops have a little bit of the tenderloin on them. In most grocery stores, it’s just going to be called something like ‘center cut pork chop.’ Look for the ones that are almost like a T-bone steak where on one part you have the pork sirloin and on the other part you have the pork tenderloin, which is very, very tender.”

Jay Beland is a butcher at Lemay and Sons Beef in Goffstown. He is a big proponent of grilling sausages.

“It’s a great way to cook,” Beland said. “Do a sausage. It’s an easy thing to do. You pretty much just put it on the grill, usually for 10, 15 minutes at most, and you get a great turnout on pretty much any of the sausages we make — everything from sweet Italian sausages to Chinese to garlic and cheese.”

The key, Beland said, is to watch your sausages carefully.

“Grilling,” he said, “versus any other way of cooking, gives you more of that char-type flavor to the surface of what you’re cooking. Plus, the thing to be careful of when you’re grilling sausages is not to grill it at a high temperature because it creates scorching. And if your sausage has a natural casing, it may not be as resilient to the heat like it would be if it was an artificial casing. So low and slower may be more preferred when it comes to grilling a sausage. So when you’ve got different [heat] zones over the coals, you cook it out toward the outside where it’s a little cooler. It’s not like a steak where a steak can take the heat, you sear it, and then you move it to a lower temperature so then you finish cooking it. What you want to do with a sausage is more of a slow, even cook, all the way through.”

Beland and the other butchers at LeMay and Sons enjoy grilling with gas grills, as well as over charcoal, but are emphatic about what type of charcoal to use. “LUMP!” they said in unison when asked. Lump charcoal is made from chunks of wood that have been carbonized in a low-oxygen environment. Many grillers like the quality of the heat they get from it.

Shop manager Rick LeMay explained his opinion about the difference in quality between lump charcoal and briquettes.

“The problem with a lot of charcoals today,” he said, “is you’ve got manmade, artificial stuff. They try to simulate what our parents or ancestors used to do when it came to burning wood, but that was cooking with wood coal, versus an artificial [briquette] that somebody’s decided to make something out of something else. Why can’t you use charcoal that looks like charcoal? I got my neighbor going with lump charcoal. It’s more like cooking with wood.”

“Plus,” LeMay added, “with charcoal, you can always inject some smoke. You know, put a little piece of hickory in there. If you want lighter, go apple. You can always inject a little smoke flavor.”

LeMay particularly likes the versatility of flank steak.

“It’s a more grainy, textured steak, like steak tips would be,” he said. “It’s what’s used in a Chinese restaurant when you get steak on a stick, the teriyaki steak, if you will. It can be sliced thin. You could use it for fajitas. Or you can slice it a little thicker. You can dry rub it. You can grill it openly, as a whole piece. It’s not very thick, but it’s like a sheet of paper in such a way where you can grill both sides. You sear it, you leave the inside medium to rare, and then you slice it afterward, after letting it rest for a bit, like any beef cut, and then you can slice it paper thin like a shaved steak, or you can slice a little bit thicker like a fajita or you can slice a little bit thicker than that like a steak tip.”

LeMay said it’s important to remember to slice any beef — especially something like flank steak, which has a lot of texture — against the grain of the muscle fibers. “Otherwise,” he said, “you’re dealing with jerky. It’s a great thing to do for the in-laws if you don’t want them to come back.”

Another cut of beef that has been growing in popularity is one called “picana,” which comes from the hip of a steer.

“It’s part of the sirloin,” LeMay said. “You won’t see it for sale up here in the Northeast much, because it’s more of a southwestern item. The pincana is comparable to a sirloin steak in its texture, but it has a nice fat cap on it. It has some marbling, but it’s not intense like a rib-eye. It’s a tender piece of meat that has a pretty good flavor to it for its price point. It’s commonly done as a whole piece. It’s not a large piece. It’s usually three pounds or less as an entirety. So it allows you to cook a whole muscle on the grill or the smoker without having a significant poundage for a family where you can smoke that and slice it and have it for a meal rather than doing something that would be significantly [larger] in size like a 10-pound sirloin.”

Lemay said home grillers should not be afraid of a little fat on their beef.

“The marbling on a steak is good,” he said, “because it’s forgiving. If someone overcooks it, it will still be tender if it’s got enough fat. That’s why steak tips are popular with a lot of people, because they are pretty much foolproof for grilling.”

Some hobbyist grillers are experimenting to find ways of cooking “low and slow” with their grills, LeMay said.

“Can you use your grill as a smoker?” he asked. “You can. It takes a little bit more effort to do so, but it’s possible. More people nowadays are turning their charcoal grills into smokers. My neighbor, he’s got a Weber kettle [grill]. He lights the lump coal in the back, puts the wood [for smoking] on one side, and then just lets it smolder and puts all this food on the side where [the heat] is indirect.”

Keith Sarasin, the head chef and owner of The Farmer’s Dinner (thefarmersdinner.com) pop-up restaurant, is the author of Meat: The Ultimate Cookbook (2021, Cider Mill Press). He said a home cook should use whatever type of grill makes their life easier.

“Really what I’m looking for,” he said, “is something easy. I think a lot of times people associate cooking with this laborious task, and grilling should be fun. Propane is obviously really great. If you’re looking at two-zone cooking, with one side for hot searing and the other for cooling and finishing, propane has a more regulated heat. It allows you to regulate and keep a consistent temp. It’s one of the reasons it’s been so popular throughout all the years.”

“Charcoal will give you kind of that more backyard barbecue taste,” Sarasin said, “as opposed to propane. It’s delicious and it’s a great medium and I cook on it a lot. But when you’re starting to [experiment with] woods and charcoals, you’re dealing with a tremendous amount of fluctuation in temperature.”

“There are a number of things that I like to consider when I’m looking for a charcoal grill,” Sarasin continued. “First and foremost is airflow. I need adjustable vents on both the intake and exhaust for that. That gives me control over the temperature. The better the control, the easier it is to go low and slow or hot and fast, depending on what you need. The other thing that I’m looking for is a coal management system. Basically, I’ll look for, ‘How easily can I move these coals around? Is there a charcoal grate that allows for indirect and direct zones?’”

Sarasin admitted that charcoal grills involve a certain amount of maintenance: “I think cleaning and ash removal is a really important thing. A lot of people don’t clean their grills properly. They’ll do an entire summer of grilling and they’ll never empty the coal pan or the ash tray, so you get all this buildup, and that’s one of the things that contributes a lot to fires.”

As a griller gains experience and gets more confident, Sarasin said, a natural next step is to play around with different woods that produce different levels and flavors of smoke.

“As you start to get into woods, that’s when things go very, very different,” he said. “I’d start with applewood because it’s something that we have an abundance of because of the farms here. And applewood has a very sweet and mild taste to it. It is fantastic for poultry and for veggies. I smoke with applewood quite a bit.”

“If you’re starting to get into brisket and ribs and all of those things,” Sarasin said, “you can go a couple of ways. In Texas they use post oak because it’s literally the greatest wood for smoking brisket. Hickory and mesquite also work really, really well. Then you have things like pecan and maple woods. Those are really good for poultry as well. I like maple and salmon and anything delicate because it does give a sweet and subtle flavor to it, as opposed to mesquite, which is very earthy and sharp.

Chef Sarasin said that when he grills at home he defaults to a particular cut of beef.

“For grilling,” he said, “I am a huge fan of just flap steak. The reason I like it is because flap has a lot of wonderful marbleization to it. It’s not too tough. It works wonderfully for steak tips. And we’re a New England culture, and steak tips are part of our New England culture. Steak tips are part of our backbone and DNA.”

“I think that’s what I’m going to do for dinner tonight,” he said after a moment of reflection.

Featured photo. Steak tips. Photo by John Fladd.

What to drink this summer

By John Fladd
jfladd@hippopress.com

Summer provides another season, another reason for making some new sipping choices. It’s easy to fall back on drinking habits and not explore new drinks that might be right up your alley.

Emma Stetson thinks you should think about trying some new wines. She is the owner of Wine on Main in Concord and holds WSET (Wine Spirits Education Trust) Level Three certification in wine and spirits. A good place to start exploring, she said, is with rosés.

“For me,” she said, “the first thing that comes to mind for summer wines is rosé. It’s such a seasonal drink. It originated kind of in the Mediterranean, especially in France for the summers and people who are in their boats and who are looking for something with fresh acidity and very light and dry and clean and classic to enjoy even like with lunch or in the afternoon in those warm areas. It’s something very seasonal, so usually the freshest batch of rosé — which is 2024 now — you start seeing those come out around April and then they start disappearing again about September. They say it’s rosé season when the boats go in the water and when they come out of the water it ends.” (To clarify: “boats” in this case are yachts, not fishing boats.)

“Some people think that rosés are sweet,” Stetson said. ”That’s a misconception that people come to us with. I feel like white zinfandel gave rosé a bad rep because it’s a pink, sticky, sweet drink. But most rosés are dry and light and elegant, more along the lines of a white wine.”

Stetson also suggested that wine adventurers keep an open mind and think about wine cocktails.

“My husband and I traveled to Portugal last summer, and the best summer drink that we came home with is the Porto Tonic. You think of port being like a fortified, robust offering that you might enjoy like in front of the fire or something in the wintertime. But in warmer months, if you go to Portugal, everybody drinks the Porto Tonic. You start with lots of ice, tonic water, an orange slice, and then a kind of a port floater. They usually use white port, but you can use anything. We really like it with tawny port. It’s kind of like a spritz, if you will, kind of like a play on the gin and tonic or the Aperol spritz, but with port.”

Emma Stetson’s summer wine recommendations

“Mont Gravet Rosé is made just outside of Provence, France. It’s totally delicious, very light, very easy drinking and clean,” Stetson said.

“Artigiano Rosé is a rosé of Montepulciano from Italy — Montepulciano being the grape. That one’s fun. It’s still dry and relatively light in the glass, but just a little bit more flavorful. There’s like a little bit more strawberry and watermelon [flavors] for you to sink your teeth into. It’s just drinking phenomenally right now.” (750 ml, $13.99 at NH Liquor & Wine Outlets)

“Any aromatic dry white wine is great,” Stetson said. “I love vinho verde in the summertime. That is a little bit lighter in alcohol too. It’s from a region in northern Portugal. Vinho verde is the grape that the wine is named after, but it’s become synonymous with a style of wine. What they do is they stop fermentation before all of the sugar has transformed into alcohol. They’re not extremely sweet, but there is a little bit of natural sugar left behind. They are just very appealing and easy drinking in the afternoons.” (Bicudo Vinho Verde, 750 ml, is $13.99 at NH Liquor & Wine Outlets.)

Emma Round owns Unwined Wine Bar in Milford. She’s also a fan of rosés in warm weather.

“As soon as I think about the summer,” Round said, “I think about ‘porch pounders.’ I think about rosés, I think easy-drinking, light, bright, breezy wines that we can enjoy with the amazing seafood we have here in New England. For me a ‘porch pounder’ is something that’s easy-drinking, with medium to high acidity, very smooth forward — something that is better drunk alone. You don’t need food for it. You don’t need it to be complex. You want it to be easy drinking.”

An additional advantage for that type of wine, Round said, is its affordability. “Something that we have to be very conscious of currently is economics,” she said. “We are in an economic downturn, so we want to drink affordably. We want to have the best-quality products for a lower price.”

Robert Waite, owner of Averill House Vineyard in Brookline, has an out-of-the-box summer wine suggestion: wine slushies, which he serves at his vineyard during the summer. Imagine a drink of ice granules and syrup from a convenience store, but made with good-quality wine.

“We make wine slushies with a red or a white wine every day,” Waite said. “And then the customer also has the ability to have the two blended and we call that a Zebra. So that’s always kind of fun and the flavors change from week to week, depending on which type of wine we’re using.” Averill House has been using South African wines in its white slushies recently. “They are really fun,” Waite said. “And then on the red side we have a couple that work really well. One of them is an aged blueberry wine that is aged with oak. We actually make it both ways, a sweet and a dry, but the dry is what we would use in the slushy. Because what happens is when you get the ice, any sweetness that’s in the wine itself is enhanced by the ice.”

The wine slushies go extremely well with food, Waite said, but obviously not anything that takes itself too seriously. “We usually have a couple of different things to serve with them,” he said, “”but one of the fun things that we offer is a tasting board that is wine chips. They’re actually potato chips that are created specifically to enhance the flavors of wine. That’s kind of fun because you’ve got a sweet component inside the wine and then you’ve got a seasoned and salty combination with the chips.”

Krista Fisher’s summer cocktail recommendations

You’ve got company, but it’s been raining all week: “If you’re staying inside, pop a bottle of prosecco. People love that,” Fisher said. “The sound of the pop of a cork is an instant party. Whether it’s raining out or not, it’s going to put people in that mood. A great cocktail to add to that to is a French 75. That’s my go-to for a cocktail. Bubbly, lemony, a little bit of gin. You could jazz it up any way you want.”

It’s been hot and dry and you’ve been gardening: “You want something like a John Daly, like what they drink on a golf course. It has fresh iced tea, fresh lemonade, vodka and fresh mint. It’s light, and when the glass sweats, it makes you thirsty,” Fisher said.

The kids have been driving you crazy all day and they’re finally out of your hair for an hour or so: “For this, you’d better make it bold and quick, right? So a nice whiskey sour. This is a good way to use brown liquors or bourbons in a more spring or summer way. Again, fresh lemon juice, a little bit of simple [syrup], and a cherry on top.”

Wine is clearly delicious and a solid summer drinking option, but when you picture sitting on a porch on a summer evening, it’s probably beer that comes to mind. Is there a difference between summer beers and ones you might drink when it’s cold outside?

Brian Link and Camaron Carter have put a lot of thought into that.

Link and Carter are the owners of the Sunstone Brewing Co. in Londonderry and, like many microbrewers, they brew different types of beer depending on the season. This summer they’ve been thinking a lot about pineapples.

“It’s one of those things where pineapples are great this time of year,” Link said. “They are super refreshing. We kind of always make a small batch of something to test it out.” One of these test batches was called Pineapple Express, which sold out almost immediately. “It flew,” Link said. “It only lasted for about a weekend.”

Traditionally, Link said, summer beers tend to be lighter — lighter in color, lighter in flavor, and lower in alcohol. At the moment, he said, Sunstone is looking at brewing something called a Saison beer. “It’s kind of light,” he said, “with an alcohol level of about five percent. It will have some fresh ginger, lavender and coriander in it. It’s going to be a nice, light, refreshing summer beer. Another thing we’re thinking of doing is a hefeweizen [a German-style beer made mostly with wheat instead of barley], which is a nice light beer. It’s got a lot of flavor, it’ll have a lot of citrus to it, it’ll be very bright and easy to drink.”

Carter said summer is a good time for brewers and beer drinkers to explore fruit beers.

“Our next sour is going to be mai tai-inspired,” he said. “Again, there’s a little bit of pineapple, but you’ve got some cherry in there too. It’s still very light and refreshing. I think our next limited release is going to be blueberry and açaí berry, with pomegranate. We’ll have a lot of small-batch and larger-batch blueberry mix-ups going through the season. Whether it’ll be a golden ale or a hefeweizen, it’ll be a good mix.”

Brian Dobson is the owner of Bert’s Beer & Wine in Manchester. He agrees that during the summer customers look for lighter beers. “I find that typically they want a lower ABV [alcohol by volume], crisper, and easy to drink,” he said. “So a non-light beer would be like a double dry hopped IPA, right, where it’s very thick in the body, and if you drink two of them really fast you’re going to feel very full. Whereas if you drink a wheat beer you can have a couple of those and you’re going to be fine. Typically when someone comes to me and they’re like, ‘I want something light and easy for hot weather’ or ‘I want [something to drink while] I sit on the patio’, that’s what they’re looking for.”

Krista Fisher is the manager and bar manager at Local Street Eats in Nashua. She designs a slate of summer cocktails based on ingredients that are especially good and available.

“I always usually say we live in such a great area,” Fisher said. “In New Hampshire, just having all the seasons means we have all different things available to us season to season. There are a couple of staple drinks that stay on the menu year-round,” Fisher said, “but usually we try to change up just about everything the same way the kitchen would. So I think our menu has about 12 or 13 drinks on it, and I’ll probably change at least nine of them. As we go into the summer, this is the menu we’ve most been looking forward to. The fact that we can pick our own strawberries, blueberries, flowers, everything like that, right in our neighborhood really inspires the drink menu pretty hard. Fresh is always the way to go.”

Brian Dobson’s New Hampshire summer beer recommendations

White Mountain White Ale by Concord Craft Brewing: “It’s light and easy to drink. It’s got a good orange flavor, and a little coriander,” Dobson said. $3.80 per 16-ounce can at Bert’s.

“I always recommend Schilling’s beers. They’re out of Littleton, New Hampshire. They do a lot of old-world style, Pilsners and lagers, either German or Czech style,” he said. “They have dark lagers, which are roasty and malty, but still light on the tongue and crisp and refreshing. They’re fantastic.” Schilling Especial Mexican-Style Lager is $4.10 per 16-ounce can at Bert’s.
“Woodstock [The Woodstock Inn Brewery] does a Lemon Blueberry Pale Ale, which is very blueberry-y and very lemony.” $3.20 per 16-ounce can at Bert’s.
“The Sea Dog Blue Paw is kind of a classic that you can have year round; it’s light and easy to drink.” $19.95 for a 12-pack of 12-ounce cans at Bert’s.

Fisher, too, sees summer as a time for lighter drinks.

“I try to always lighten up bourbons and stuff like that,” she said, “to make them all-season. But when you think of summer, you definitely think of gins and tequilas. I mean, margaritas are the drink of the summer, right? But also lower-ABV stuff because it’s hotter out and people are maybe outside a little bit more. So that’s where spritzes will always be popular, something with a lower level of alcohol, maybe like an aperitif. So, something like prosecco that has bubbles, that you can drink by the pool but then not feel like, ‘Oh man, I can’t do anything for the rest of the day.’”

Marissa Chick, the bar manager at The Birch on Elm in Manchester, considers a classic daiquiri one of the quintessential cocktails of summer — not, she hastened to add, the frozen blender drinks that call themselves daiquiris.

“A daiquiri is pretty simple and a classic,” she said. “The only ingredients that need to be in there for it to be a daiquiri are lime, sugar and rum. Rum and summer go together like hand in hand. It’s just nice and refreshing, at least if you’re doing it the original way. So it’s supposed to be fairly tart, not too sweet, but pretty dry as well. So like a dry, tart drink.”

“When I started bartending,” Chick said, “I learned the Hemingway daiquiri first; it was Hemingway’s drink of choice — super tart and way less sweet. Iit was white rum, lime, grapefruit and maraschino liqueur. It had double the amount of rum as usual.”

One of the reasons Chick likes daiquiris so much, she said, is their adaptability. She recently won a “Daq-Off” daiquiri-making competition with a bright pink Bubble Gum Daiquiri. “I had tried to make a bubble gum drink work for a while,” she said, “I tried out a couple different variations … Once I heard about the Daq-Off happening, I thought, well, that’s a fun drink and I feel like something sweet obviously goes in the daiquiri very well. So I researched bubble gum a little bit to see what kind of flavorings go into it naturally, like cherry, pineapple, lime and mint. I used natural pineapple juice, natural cranberry juice, cherry juice, and made everything separate. I used a dark rum and [the finished drink] was a nice bright pink color. I used a charred pineapple with some pineapple fronds as garnish. So it was very summery and fun.”

Emma Round’s summer wine recommendations

“I have an incredible rosé on my list right now called Prisma from Chile,” Round said. “It’s a rosé, it is a pinot noir base. It’s very fruity. We all think of red pinot noir, but this is a rosé pinot noir. It is very bold, but it’s very easy-drinking and it’s really nice by itself. I could happily drink a bottle of it by myself.” (750 ml, $13.99 at NH Liquor & Wine Outlets)

To drink at a clam bake: “With clams and lobsters I want something with a little backbone but I also want some minerality to it. So my first reach would probably be a vinho verde or an alborinho,” Round said. According to winefolly.com, this is another Portuguese wine from the coastal area of the Iberian Peninsula, popular for its rich stone fruit flavors, a hint of salinity, and its zippy acidity. An example: Nortico Alvarinho, 750 ml, $18.99 at NH Liquor & Wine Outlets.

To drink at a backyard barbecue with burgers and hot dogs: “So, with burgers and dogs, if you want to go red. I would probably pick up a pinotage from South Africa,” Round said. “In South Africa they do things called braais. A braai is their version of grilling, barbecuing. Pinotages are a good match for them. They have a richness, a meatiness to them. And they give off notes of berries, almost like a tea flavor with some orange peel in there.” Consider Longridge Pinotage, 750 ml, $26.99 at NH Liquor & Wine Outlets.

To drink on a picnic: “I would love for someone on a picnic to pull out a crémant — a crémant de Loire, a crémant de Bourgogne, a crémant of some sort,” Round said. “It’s a sparkling wine. Usually they’re from different areas of France. They are made in the same style as Champagne, but they’re more affordable. They use different [grape] varietals. A creme de Loire usually contains like a chenin blanc, which gives it some more floral notes, and they’re just beautiful, well-made sparkling wines at a much lower price point than a Champagne, but similar quality. For me, they go beautifully with crackers and a charcuterie board. You can get a good crémant for 20 bucks.” An example: Maurice Bonnamy Cremant De Loire Brut, $18.99 at NH Liquor & Wine Outlets.

Featured photo: Blueberry Daiquiri by Marissa Chick. Courtesy photo.